Tall tales and great gossips

Bret Easton Ellis's Lunar Park starts as a "wry autobiography", then "somehow mutates into this year's most interesting novel", declared Christopher Cleave in the Sunday Telegraph. "Ellis's portrayal of the anxieties of modern parenthood is sensitive and poignant and shames the critics who crow about an 'emotional vacuum' at the heart of his work ... Most of all, it is a triumphant piece of storytelling." "He's terrific when it comes to modern parental manias," agreed Douglas Kennedy in the Times, "and in his depiction of his haunted relationship with his dead father he demonstrates his ability to write with great emotional complexity and depth."

"The fictional Ellis ... is always inadequate in the face of events," noted Siddhartha Deb in the Daily Telegraph, "especially as they take increasingly bizarre turns: teenage boys go missing; a toy bird starts coming alive; the dead father still seems to be around; and Patrick Bateman, the serial killer from American Psycho, shows up at a party. The resulting suburban Gothic is impressively disorientating." No it isn't, argued Stephen Amidon in the Sunday Times, this is exactly the point at which "things start to go wrong, both for Bret and the novel ... Perhaps most terrifying of all is the transformation of the author's prose from the luminously cool irony of the opening chapters into those portentous, single-sentence paragraphs favoured by Stephen King and Dean Koontz."

"There seems to be a widespread notion that Alan Bennett is cuddly," wrote Sam Leith in the Daily Telegraph, reviewing Untold Stories. "Nobody who reads him can think so. Sometimes ... he's rather unattractive; vain and censorious." Nevertheless, "this thick book is so full of good things they could sell it for twice the price." "Even when discussing boredom, Bennett is never boring," observed Cal McCrystal in the Independent on Sunday. "Throughout this autobiography runs a belief in good sense, tolerance and clemency, along with a real depth of sentiment, clothed in the language of brilliant and witty perspicuity which gives to these 658 pages an enduring claim to respect." Bennett is "unfashionably ready to call vulgarity and stupidity vulgarity and stupidity", announced a smitten John Carey in the Sunday Times. "The modern jargons we invent to keep reality at bay arouse his scorn [and] puncturing reputations is a speciality ... I have never read a book of this length where I have turned the last page with such regret. It is intelligent, educated, engaging, humane, self-aware, cantankerous and irresistibly funny. You want it to go on for ever."

John Berendt's The City of Falling Angels "seeks to repeat the infectious, gossipy reportage of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil in a new location: Venice", said James Urquhart in the Financial Times. "Again, Berendt draws in charming vignettes of local characters who give piquancy to his narrative," but unfortunately "few of these Venetians equal, for sheer eccentricity, the oddballs found in Midnight".

Nevertheless, Peter Kemp in the Sunday Times thought it was "richly atmospheric, entertaining and informative". He especially enjoyed Berendt's report of why the 200-year-old opera house La Fenice burned down in 1996. "The inquiry into this is eye-openingly recounted," said Kemp. "Carelessness and criminality ... vie as explanations." "This sort of book depends on the author's ability to pick out a decent story," said Philip Hensher in the Daily Telegraph. "Some of Berendt's witnesses, alas, quickly reveal themselves as terrible bores ... One wonders, really, why Berendt picked on Venice ... Really, one could very easily find very similar scandals, very similar exhibitions of snobbery, very similar displays of conspicuous eccentricity in any city in Europe. A book along these lines about Harrogate would at least have the virtue of originality. This one, I'm afraid, has been written with one eye on the vast, credulous market of city breakers."